Coffee drinkers relax! It’s basically medicine

Image: Jarmaluk, Pixabay, CC0

TAKEAWAY key fact: In one of the largest studies ever on the topic, researchers followed over 500,000 people in 10 European countries for over 16 years. They found that compared to non-coffee drinkers, participants who had the highest coffee intake had lower all-cause mortality. All-cause mortality means: All of the deaths that occur in a population, regardless of the cause. It is measured in clinical trials and used as an indicator of the safety or hazard of an intervention. The tests measured the association of coffee consumption with serum biomarkers of liver function, inflammation, and metabolic health.

The study was published in the medical journal the Annals of Internal Medicine. Its objective was to examine whether coffee consumption is associated with all-cause and cause-specific mortality.

 

 

Results (I highlighted the good news):During a mean follow-up of 16.4 years, 41 693 deaths occurred. Compared with nonconsumers, participants in the highest quartile of coffee consumption had statistically significantly lower all-cause mortality. Inverse associations  (good news) were also observed for digestive disease mortality for men and women. Among women, there was a statistically significant inverse association of coffee drinking with circulatory disease mortality and cerebrovascular disease mortality and a positive association with ovarian cancer mortality. Higher coffee consumption was associated with lower serum alkaline phosphatase; alanine aminotransferase; aspartate aminotransferase; γ-glutamyltransferase; and, in women, C-reactive protein, lipoprotein(a), and glycated hemoglobin levels.

Conclusion:Coffee drinking was associated with reduced risk for death from various causes. This relationship did not vary by country.

Another, similar,  study which focused on almost 200,000 people in Hawaii and Los Angeles also found positive outcomes for coffees drinkers, concluding that higher consumption of coffee was associated with lower risk of death in blacks, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and whites. This study saw no difference between caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee results.